User:Ejoon9/sandbox

A global value chain (GVC) refers to the full range of activities that firms and workers do to bring a product or service from its conception to its end use and beyond. This includes the tangible activities related to producing,distributing and transporting the product (supply chain), as well as other activities that add value to a product, but do not necessarily result in physical alterations. These “intangible” activities include research, design,marketing and support services. The activities that comprise a global value chain can be contained within a single firm or divided among different firms. GVC activities can be contained within a single geographical location or spread over wider areas. The value chain concept encompasses all stages in the innovation to commercialization process and can be used to analyze any product, service, or enabling technology (cite GVC Concepts Website).

Origins and History
A GVC approach mainly originates in a global commodity chain (GCC) concept. In 1986, two World-System theorists,Hopkins and Wallerstein, defined GCC as “a network of labor production process whose end results is a finished product.” The concept was initially developed to understand the geographic expansion and contraction of early modern capitalism, but later it was adopted by development scholars t ocapture the emerging patterns of postwar industrialization, i.e., the disaggregation and geographic spread of production activities, and development challenges in export-oriented industries. This reformulation was encapsulatedin a collected volume, Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism, edited by Gary Gereffi and Miguel Korzeniewicz. Theoriginal GCC approach was the first approach created to analyze both firm andinter-firm networks on a local and global scale, permitting researchers toforge the macro-micro links between firms previously assumed to be discreetlycontained within global, national, and local units of analysis.